Putty is a popular SSH client for Windows, allowing Windows users secure SSH access to Linux VMs running on CloudSigma’s cloud. You can download PuTTY and PuTTYgen here:

Generating a set of RSA keys with PuTTYgen to securely access CloudSigma’s cloud:

1. Start PuTTYgen
2. Click the Generate button
3. Move your mouse pointer around randomly in the blank area of the Key section below the progress bar until the progress bar is full. This will ensure the key is as random and unique as possible. When the progress bar completes, a public / private key pair has been generated.



4. In the Key comment field, enter any comment that will help you identify this key pair. Examples include your e-mail address, nickname etc. The key comment is particularly useful in the event you end up creating more than one key pair.
5. Optionally, type a passphrase in the Key passphrase field then re-type the same passphrase in the Confirm passphrase field. Please note that should you choose to complete this step, you will not be able to use your keys for automated processes, as you will be prompted to enter this phrase each time the key is used.
6. Click the Save public key button and save your new public key.
7. Click the Save private key button and choose whatever filename you’d like. You can save it in the same location as the public key, but it should be a location that only you can access and that you will NOT lose! If you lose your keys and have disabled username/password logins, you will no longer be able log in!

Adding PuTTYgen generated public / private key pairs to your CloudSigma account:

Now that we have created our public / private key pair, we can proceed to upload it to your CloudSigma account. Please note that should you ever lose your public key, simply load your private key in Puttygen and it will be displayed to you.

1. Please do NOT click on ‘save public key’, as Puttygen uses a different format to OpenSSH. Thankfully, Puttygen does display the OpenSSH-compatible public key in the field labeled ‘Public key for pasting into OpenSSH’. Select all the text in this field and copy it to clipboard.



2. Go back to the CloudSigma SSH key screen and paste this into the ‘public SSH key’ field. Click save.



3. Open Putty and expand Connection / SSH / Auth and under ‘Private key file for authentication’, click browse and locate the Private Key (.ppk) that Puttygen created. In order to avoid having to manually add your SSH private key to Putty every time it launches, go back to the ‘Session’ menu, give this session a name and click save.



• About
• Latest

About Alexander Georgiev
Alex is a Project Manager and Technical Writer at CloudSigma. He is a BSc Computer Science graduate from Brunel University, West London, graduating with 1st class Honours. His university dissertation was a modular middleware solution, database and device independent bidirectional SMS alerting system primarily for use in, but not limited to the NHS (GP practices), very much akin to the SMS games or SMS car parking services that have since become mainstream. Alex has prolonged exposure to a broad range of disciplines in computing including networking, database design and deployment, web and Java development, cloud computing architecture, to name but a few. Since joining CloudSigma where he works as a Director of Research and Project Manager of EU Funding, where he has attained thorough expertise in the operation and development of data centre and cloud stack infrastructure.
• How to Run Docker on CloudSigma (with CloudInit) Updated - June 30, 2016
• Successful End to the First Year of CloudSME - October 7, 2014